AI Central has been upgraded and is now offering daily content. Today’s article is The Clanker in the Kitchen:
A survey by the app Seated found that the average couple spends roughly five full days per year just deciding what to eat, which feels both absurd and entirely accurate. Researchers call this the “invisible mental load,” and cooking sits squarely at its center, requiring not just the act of preparing food but the anticipation, organization, and constant recalibration that precedes it. For the person who carries this load, the question “what’s for dinner?” functions less as a question and more as a recurring task that never quite gets crossed off the list.
Which helps explain why a new generation of AI meal planning apps has found such an eager audience. Apps like Ollie, which has been featured in The Washington Post and Forbes, market themselves less as recipe databases and more as cognitive relief systems. “Put your meals on autopilot,” the homepage reads, with “Dinner done, mental load off” as the tagline. User testimonials cut straight to the emotional core of the value proposition, with one reading: “I feel pretty foolish to say an app has changed my life, but it has! It plans your groceries, it plans your meals. IT TAKES THE THINKING OUT.”
The pitch works precisely because it addresses something real. Decision fatigue is well-documented in psychology research as the phenomenon where the quality of our choices degrades as we make more of them throughout the day, and by dinnertime, after hours of decisions large and small, many of us default to whatever requires the least thought: takeout, frozen pizza, or cereal eaten standing over the sink. AI meal planners promise to front-load all those decisions at once, ideally on a Sunday afternoon when cognitive reserves are fuller, and then execute the plan automatically throughout the week.
I’ve drafted one of the devs from UATV to take the lead at AI Central, since he is a) far more technical than JDA or me and b) I’m far too busy analyzing ancient DNA and cranking out science papers and hard science fiction based on them to do more than a post or two a week there. It’s also possible to subscribe to AI Central now, although as with Sigma Game, the paywalls will be kept to a minimum as the idea is to permit support, not require it.
The reason I suggest that it is very important to at least get a free subscription to AI Central and make it a part of your daily routine is that if you have not yet begun to adopt AI of various sorts into your various performance functions, you will absolutely be left behind by those who do.
Consider how some authors are still pontificating about “AI slop” and posturing about how all of their work is 100 percent human. Meanwhile, I’m turning out several books per month with higher ratings than theirs, better sales than most of theirs, and producing the translations that native speakers at foreign language publishers deem both acceptable and publishable. For example, I haven’t even published THE FROZEN GENE yet, but LE GÈNE GELÉ is already translated into French utilizing a varied form of the Red Team Stress Test approach, already has an offer from a French publisher for the print edition, and has been very favorably reviewed by AIs not involved in the translation process.
Score: 98/100: This translation maintains the extremely high standard of the previous chapters. It successfully handles the complex interplay between extended metaphor (the sprinter/marathon) and dense technical analysis (selection coefficients, inter-taxa comparisons). The prose is confident, fluid, and intellectually rigorous. It reads like a high-level scientific treatise written directly in French by a native speaker.
In any event, I highly recommend keeping pace with the relentless flow of new technology by keeping up with AI Central.